


and yet we fell anyways

by machinistwench



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Snark, eridan and jade live on farms in kansas and sass each other, sharpshooting, snarky sharpshooting, that's it that's the story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 02:16:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 6,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1727417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machinistwench/pseuds/machinistwench
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An old fill for an old kink meme prompt: "It's a canon fact that both Eridan and Jade are pretty much awesome when it comes to shootin' stuff and I feel like that's a thing that needs fic about it."</p><p>Jade and Eridan shooting, snarking, and teaching interspecies biology lessons through sloppy makeouts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reversemermaid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reversemermaid/gifts).



> this came into being thanks to reversemermaid, who is awesome and should feel awesome

The first time Jade Harley ever gets out-shot is a warm summer evening when the stars are just barely coming out. She had meticulously set up her targets (plain tin cans tonight, she had thought of something different and better but then fallen asleep and forgotten), made her way back up to her favored position, laid down on her carefully-prepared blanket, recorded the conditions in her notebook, taken aim and-

her targets are gone.

Not just one of them, blown over by the wind; that happens sometimes and it’s okay, because she always makes sure to set up extras! No, they’re all gone, and when she goes to check to see what in the world had happened to them, all she finds are a few twisted, charred hunks of metal on her side of the fence, still warm to the touch. She wrinkles her nose as she sniffs at them; this is definitely the work of one of the trolls from the neighboring farm, with all their fancy laser guns and whatnot. She's a lead-and-gunpowder girl herself, and this affront has her bristling. Who does that asshole think he is, anyways? Nobody, and she means nobody outshoots Jade Harley.

The next day, when she goes out to lay down her blanket and set up her targets, there's already a line of shapes on the fence. With an indignant huff (excuse you, that is my fence you're putting your shit on, fuckass!) she flops down onto the blanket and takes a careful look at her new prey through the rifle scope.

Shells.

Stupid lousy goddamn seashells. That idiot ruined her perfectly good cans just to replace them with some pansy-ass crustaceous outergrowths? Oh please, he has got to be kidding. Can't he do better than that? Before she can even remember to write down the conditions she's shooting in (temperature, humidity, time, wind speed, all of these are crucial to analyzing her results) she's fallen into the routine of cock, aim, fire, and suddenly the air above the fence is full of exploding shitty seashells.

As soon as she's done thoroughly destroying the targets her nameless rival so magnanimously provided for her, she marches herself on down to the fence and rearranges the pieces into one four-letter word: JADE. If he's going to try to insult her, he'd damn well better at least know her name. The pieces are sharp, just how she'd wanted them to be. 

Serves the bastard right.


	2. Chapter 2

caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling gardenGnostic [GG]   
CA: wwho the fuck do you think you are shootin my targets off of the fence before i could evven take a crack at em   
CA: i wwouldnt exactly call that sportin wwould you   
GG: you have got to be kidding me!!!   
GG: you shot down my cans first   
GG: and besides, are seashells really the best you can do?   
CA: oh alright landdwweller i see howw its goin to be   
CA: its not like you could come up wwith anythin better if you tried   
CA: an evven if you did i wwouldnt havve a speck a trouble fuckin destroying it wwith the crosshairs   
GG: so you think im just going to lay down and take this??   
GG: kindly save your bullshit for somebody else, mr i-cant-even-spell-my-gerunds-right!   
CA: excuse you my name is eridan ampora   
CA: and i can so use my gerunds right   
CA: i'm GOING to FUCKING slay your targets the next time you put some up   
GG: is that a challenge mr ampora?   
CA: you could call it that   
GG: in that case youre on!   
GG: whoever misses a target first loses   
GG: deal?   
CA: you got yourself a fuckin deal   
CA: wwhat the fuck color is your blood anywways   
CA: i didnt knoww there wwere any limebloods left   
GG: youre on!   
GG: and its red   
GG: but i dont know why you care??   
GG: and whats a limeblood anyways?   
CA: wwait WWHAT   
CA: you mean youre human   
GG: well yeah, what else would i be?   
CA: so you mean you shot those seashells all the wway from that blanket wwith that piece a shit rifle a yours an youre not evven a troll   
GG: hold on asshole, my rife is amazing and could kick your toy guns ass any day!!!   
GG: and of course i did   
GG: where else would i have shot from?   
GG: the grass is itchy you know!   
CA: wwhoa there missy ahabs crosshairs is the farthest thing from a toy the univverse has evver seen   
CA: its a wweapon of unbelievvable strength and powwer   
CA: one that you wwouldnt havve a hope of bein able to wwield properly   
CA: no wwonder you stick to your archaic human technology   
GG: oh im sure   
GG: whatever helps you sleep at night   
GG: and i bet i can shoot better with my "archaic" rifle than you can with that fancy laser thing any day of the week fishboy   
GG: lasers just cant touch a good bullet!   
CA: i see that this is goin to be a lot more fun that i thought it wwould be   
caligulasAquarium [CA] ceased trolling gardenGnostic [GG]

When Eridan goes outside the next evening, rife firmly in hand and still seething over the landdweller's impudence, his gaze immediately goes to the fenceline in search of a target. Belatedly, he realizes that he never learned the girl's name; it's just as well, though, because as soon as it's his turn she's going to lose as fast as the sun sets during the winter. A flutter of movement under one of the trees along the fence catches his eye, and he dismisses it as a bird, until he sees more, lined up perfectly straight under the branch and swirling in the breeze. He swears under his breath and raises his rifle scope to his eye to get a better look; if Ter had started stringing up butterflies while she and Kar were visiting he was going to-

wait.

They’re tea bags, and clearly she’s mocking him. If that girl thinks that that’s going to be a challenge for him, Eridan Ampora, the undisputed sharp-shooting champion of his family and scourge of gun ranges from coast to coast, he’s going to change her mind and he’s going to do it fuckin' quick.

Focus, Ampora, he tells himself as he takes aim, arms steady as rocks despite the strain of supporting the Crosshairs, this ain't the time to mess up.

Deep breath in, deep breath out.

He fires, and the first bag vaporizes. He doesn't see why she needs five, but he picks them all off in rapid succession, lowering his rifle and sauntering down the hill once he's done. They had been pathetically easy to hit (okay, not really, the wind might have posed a bit of a challenge, but he's never going to admit it out loud), and already his mind was whirling through ideas of what he could do to give her something to think about.

He seizes upon a particularly promising one as he comes upon the scorched ruin of the tea bags, strings still fluttering down from the branch. This close, he can see where the tops of the bags avoided disintegration, and he can tell they were hand-tied. The smell is nothing he recognizes, but it's surprisingly pleasant for something a landdweller, much less a human, had to have made. His eyes travel a little further, over to her side of the fence, and damn if those seashell fragments haven't been rearranged to spell something new: JADE.

For a moment, his brain twists and turns, wondering what on Earth it could possibly mean, until he realizes the most obvious explanation: it's her name. He has an opponent, and her name is Jade.

He can't wait until tomorrow.


	3. Chapter 3

Jade is pleased by how well he's doing, and the fact that he took a single scorched remnant of a teabag off the fence ("for a fuckin’ trophy") makes her laugh out loud when she thinks about it. She's tending to her garden, once again puzzling over what in the world could be happening to her pumpkins, when she sees something down by the fence. It's hard to make out exactly what it is through the thick glass window of the greenhouse, so she rushes to her transportalizer, forgetting that it will only take her but so far. She has to fight her way through the mess in the house (she really needs to clean up, it's been so long since Grandpa has been around to help and it's such a big place for a little girl like her) before she can get to a door and by then the figure has long since left.

It didn't go without a trace, though. Not by a long shot.

He - Eridan, she corrects herself, it's only polite to call a rival by their name, after all - had put out his next target, twelve slender sticks balanced on the fence. At first glance, it looks like magic, the way they're standing perfectly on end, but her brain immediately dismisses this in favor of equations and calculations of weight and balance and mechanical equilibrium. Clearly he knows his science, and she can't let his efforts go unrecognized, now can she? Grabbing her trusty rifle (she's alchemized copy after copy, left them all over the house so she'll never lose it no matter how much she forgets), she flies out the door, ignoring Bec's concerned barking over how this isn't the regular time she goes out shooting.

Jade has a boy to show up.

This time, she takes her shots standing up, barely taking time to appreciate the intricate patterning on what she belatedly is realizing are wands before she's knocking off the top, middle, and bottom in a rapid-fire pattern. He'd probably meant for one to knock off the next as she shot, but luckily she was quick enough to hit them all before they went down. One was kinda tricky, but luckily she knew just when to shoot through the fence to split it neatly in two. Those weird prophetic dreams she had sure did come in handy sometimes!

When she makes her way down to the fence, she picks up and rearranges the shards of wood. It's only proper to give him something to think about, isn't it?

"YOUR MOVE"


	4. Chapter 4

The very first time Eridan ever sees Jade, she’s almost naked. He’s curled into a loose ball at the bottom of the deeper-than-it-should-be pond that borders their properties, just laying there wearing only his pants and breathing like he’s meant to, long, deep, watery, breaths that flutter through the membranes of his gills and feel so much better than the ones he’s forced to take on land. His introspection is disrupted by a splash from above and for a moment he’s struck with the urge to kick up, grab it by the ankle, dig his teeth into it and eat it raw, spill its blood for the plants and fish (they’d take any nutrients they could get, he knew that well from experience) until he realizes

it’s her.

The likelihood that she has a friend over and that friend happens to also have bright green eyes and the defined upper-body muscles of a riflewoman, not to mention a telltale bruise on her shoulder from the impact of a gun’s recoil, is little to none. She’s wearing a plain black swimsuit, but the fact that there’s no decoration on it doesn’t mean there’s much fabric to it. Her – Jade’s, he thinks – hair billows out around her like an inky cloud and in that moment he can’t do anything but stare; this close he can see bands of dozens of colors tied around her fingers, stacked one after the other until they blend together into a bright, indistinguishable blur. After a few seconds of observing her as she floats, eyes closed and limbs loose, he realizes that not only is staring rude, but that she probably wouldn’t expect there to be anyone else in the pond and he’s intruding on her privacy. He pushes off a submerged rock, intending to head for the surface and try to get out while her eyes are still closed. When her mouth opens and she lets out a long breath, bubbles streaming toward the air at the top of the pond, he freezes, cringing at the idea that her eyes are going to follow, that they’ll fly open and see him and she’ll never want anything to do with him again-

and then she breathes in.

For a moment, his brain buzzes with ideas (maybe she’s the human equivalent of a seadweller and she can breathe underwater? maybe she knows what she’s doing?) but as she begins to sink with no sign of a struggle Eridan realizes that something is very, very wrong. Kicking hard, he slides through the water to where she is in a beat of his cardiovascular system, catching her up in his arms and how is she even so light? It’s partly the buoyancy of the water, but there’s nothing at all to her and for a moment he’s so overwhelmed with a desperate rush of needing to take care of her he forgets to swim. Getting her out of the water is his first priority, though, and as he breaks the surface near the edge, hair falling in his face and gills flattening as he makes the transition from breathing underwater to breathing above it, he’s greeted with the snarling visage of the biggest barkbeast he’s ever seen. Scratch that, he’s seen this particular one from a distance, but looking at it through the scope of a rife and seeing its teeth six inches from his face are two completely different animals.

He kicks again, hard enough to get the leverage he needs to keep her head above the water, and as soon as the creature sees her, limp in his arms, it seems to realize something is terribly wrong. It backs away, and he manages to get her up onto the muddy side of the pond, pulling himself up after and pushing down on her stomach between the two halves of her ribcage. By some miracle, her trachea had closed while she was submerged and she’d swallowed rather than breathed in the water. She coughs and her barkbeast growls, sparks of green electricity crackling down the length of its spine, and Eridan takes that as his cue to get the hell out before she sees him.

After all, he wouldn’t want their game to be ruined by her thinking she owes him one.


	5. Chapter 5

Jade wakes up on the side of the pond gasping for breath and wondering why her throat feels so raw. Bec is close beside her, looking at her in that concerned way that only he can manage. She reaches up and brushes a hand over his fur, coming away even more confused when it isn’t wet. It’s obvious that she fell asleep while she was in the pond (it’s been happening less and less recently but now it’s even more unpredictable than it had been before), but she has no idea how she got out and why she isn’t dead. Her dog might have a lot of odd powers, but drying himself off isn’t one of them, as she knows from the experience of giving him baths. No, somebody else must have pulled her out, and her options are limited. It wasn’t Bec and Jake hadn’t come for a surprise visit or else he would still be here, so…

oh.

Oh no.

It had to have been Eridan; it only makes sense, after all. Gathering from all the times he’d called her a landdweller, he’s one of the trolls that could live underwater; he must’ve been in the water before she got in, but still she wonders why? What made him decide to save her? She could’ve – no, should’ve – died, and all that had stood between her and a corpse at the bottom of the pond was somebody she barely knew, somebody that she had only teased and antagonized. Bec noses his head under her arm and she threads her fingers through the long fur on his shoulder, gripping as tightly as her still-weak muscles will let her. Jade relaxes for the shock of teleportation, and just like that she’s sitting in her room. The first thing she does is crawl into her bed and curl up tight, letting the waves of shock and latent fear pass through her in long, shaking sobs. 

gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering caligulasAquarium [CA]   
GG: why?   
CA: wwhat the fuck do you mean wwhy   
GG: dont you dare play dumb with me eridan ampora!!!   
GG: you saved my life in the pond   
GG: and i want to know why   
CA: wwell i wwasnt about to let you die   
CA: it aint gentlemanly to let a lady die on your wwatch   
CA: an besides   
CA: you dont exactly havve anybody else lookin out for you do you   
GG: not really no   
CA: thats my point   
CA: if i hadnt pulled you out wwho wwas going to   
CA: that barkbeast of yours didnt seem too keen on gettin into the wwater   
GG: bec is the best protector i could ever hope for!   
GG: i dont know why he didnt come in after me    
GG: thats something he would usually do   
CA: wwell the fact of the matter is i wwasnt goin to let you die   
CA: wwouldnt have been decent of me   
CA: especially because ivve got plans for you missy   
GG: oh really?   
GG: and what would these "plans" be?   
GG: be warned: youre not going to find any damsels in distress in this tower   
CA: if i did id be disappointed   
CA: an dont forget   
GG: what   
CA: ahabs crosshairs is obvviously the most superior wweapon knowwn to man and trollkind   
GG: oh please thats bullshit and we both know it!   
GG: clearly the ease of my targets thus far has lulled you into a sense of security   
GG: well thats about to change   
GG: get ready for the storm fisherprince   
gardenGnostic [GG] ceased pestering caligulasAquarium [CA]


	6. Chapter 6

The next day, he’s still reeling from the idea that she thinks he _wouldn’t_ have saved her, that he would’ve just left her there in the pond to drown. It’s hard to wrap his head around, but eventually he accepts it with the justification that girls are weird sometimes. That explanation doesn’t satisfy him, not one bit, but it’s the best he can do at the moment. He doesn’t expect her to have a target out so soon after her brush with death, but yet again she’s surprised him. There’s a row of flashing _things_ hung from the same branch the teabags dangled on what seems like years ago, but from this distance he can’t make out what they are. His rifle scope doesn’t provide much clarification, either, only revealing to him small discs of glass. Eridan can’t fathom what they are to her until he sees how they’re refracting the sunlight, multiplying it many times over into rainbows fanned out across the ground.

They’re microscope lenses, old ones from broken-down assemblies, and she’s brilliant.

The targets spin in the breeze, and occasionally light bounces straight back into his eyes through the Crosshairs’ scope when he tries to get a good bead on them. It’s nigh on impossible to predict which way they’re going to swing, and he’s forced to aim manually. Somehow, he still manages to nail them all, the last one by a stroke of pure luck. It had unexpectedly flipped at the last second, and only its natural pendulum-like properties had saved him the ignominy of missing a shot. Jade is tricky, without a doubt, and he admires her all the more for it. He has a feeling that she wouldn’t let him live it down if she found a scorch mark on her side of the fence, especially if it happened to be rather conspicuously located behind where one of her targets had hung.

When he gets down to the fence, the melted glass is splattered in frostlike patterns across the boards. For a reason he can’t quite put his finger on it reminds him of her, delicate and beautiful but with the definite potential to fuck shit up. He pushes back the sleeves of his coat, picks up a stick (the remnant of a wand, destroyed so bravely in the line of duty), and swirls the tip through the glass, drawing it out into patterns of rolling waves. He misses the sea, longs for it like a child for whose mother has gone away, not that he’ll admit it to anybody. The pond is an acceptable substitute, lending him solace when he needs to be alone and just _breathe_ , but its waters don’t sting at the edges of his gills quite the way they should, don’t hold him up or break over his shoulders or fill his mouth with the taste of _life_. It’s dead and sterile there, with no fish or plants to bring it to life, and every time he slides in it’s an ugly shock to the primal part of his brain that expects to sense the electric fields of the creatures around him, that wants to feel seaweed slipping across the webbing on his fingers, that _needs_ confirmation that he isn’t alone.

Feferi could fix that, but Feferi is gone, far away to a safer place than this. There are still sometimes witch-hunts for trolls out here, one of the last bastions of pure humanity, and the last thing he wants is for the area’s bigots and human supremacists to catch the heiress of his species right within their grasp. He had almost been killed, once; they had forced him out of his house and he had run for the water, hoping he might be able to lose them there but knowing in the back of his head that they were going to catch him and string him up on a pole beside the road as a warning to any other trolls that might pass by. He could hear their feet behind him when shots rang out over his head, bullets whistling through the air to embed themselves in various extremities belonging to his pursuers. Looking back, he supposes he has something to thank Jade for.

His reverie is broken by movement at the house on the hill and Eridan snaps his head up, half-expecting her barkbeast to warp down to where he is and rip his throat out for having the audacity to come so close to the fence. He wouldn’t put it past its surely primal instincts, he understands possessiveness and protection and the need to define what’s his. It isn’t the massive white creature that comes down toward him, though.

It’s her.


	7. Chapter 7

In her haste to get the hell down to the fence and catch her rival while he’s still there, Jade flies out of the house in her rattiest old cotton shirt and cutoff shorts, ironic gifts from Dave when  he’d found out that she was moving from her island to a farm.  Only when she’s halfway down the hill, speed almost out of control (keep your legs under your hips, Harley, balance balance balance) does she realize that compared to normal apparel, she’s barely wearing anything at all.  She considers giving a shit, but that’s only for a minute and she has better things to focus on almost immediately.  Namely, Eridan.  
  
When she comes skidding in to a halt, thudding into the top slat of the fence with arms outstretched, she’s immediately overtaken with a need to observe and catalogue and study him until she’s worked out every little kink and quirk of his alien anatomy.  He’s taller than her brief impressions and glimpses of him had told her, and he has the broad shoulders of somebody accustomed to handling heavy weaponry.  Jade pushes herself up onto the fence, standing on the lowest board to equalize them almost fully, and leans over, canting her hips forward and looking him straight in the eye.  They’re purple, a startling shade of violet surrounded by a sea of goldenrod yellow, and from there her focus wanders to his horns; it looks like they’re covered in tiny, fine hairs, the density increasing as they taper to the tips, and immediately she knows that they’re sensor hairs and starts to wonder what they pick up and how sensitive they are to it: electricity? magnetism? pheromones?  At the thought of the last, a shiver runs up her spine as she remembers that she’d not showered after she’d run that day, instead becoming absorbed in the intricacies of wiring the  miniature particle accelerator that she was building around the detritus of the front foyer.  
  
She can appreciate the purple streak in his hair, but what catches her eye more is the patterning on his skin.  It almost looks like…scales?  Reaching out without a second thought, she lets the pad of one thumb run feather-light over the high curve of his left cheekbone.  He shivers under her touch and she can’t help but notice how the fin-like protrusions on his ears flare out in tandem.  The sun shines through the membranes, throwing delicate purple shadows across her face, and she tilts her head to get a better look at the shadows underneath the collar of his jacket (it’s very fancy, she notes, but still in excellent taste).  With a subtle shift, he accommodates her curiosity and pulls his shoulderblades together, rearranging the jacket to let her see what, precisely, those dark marks slicing across the skin of his throat are.  
  
They’re gills, and mentally she’s smacking herself upside the head for not immediately realizing this.  He’s a goddamned seadweller, of _course_  he has gills!  They look almost damaged around the edges, though, and she scrambles for an explanation for a moment before she realizes that the ion concentrations inside his cells and the concentrations in the pond water must be different enough to disrupt the outermost layers of his skin.  She leans forward again, moving her hand to his shoulder for balance, and without warning inhales and presses her lips against the uppermost gill slit on his left side.  The result is precisely as she expected: it flutters and flares to sudden life as she traces her tongue over it, and then she can feel the oxygen being stolen from her lungs.  He starts backwards, pulling away with a shocked look on his face, but still he returns to catch her when she nearly falls.  
  
“What the ever-lovin’ _fuck_ was that for, Harley?”


	8. Chapter 8

She’s a force of nature, Eridan briefly notes as she comes thudding into the fence, but his train of thought is completely interrupted by what she does next.  He accommodates her curiosity, lets her touch his scales and fins and then-  
  
he had _seriously_ underestimated her.  For a moment he’s breathing her air and it’s such a shock to his system that he barely processes the feeling of her tongue on his neck.  He can’t say what it is that makes him step forward and grab her when it looks like she’s losing her balance, but suddenly they’re a good deal closer together than they were just a few seconds ago.  
  
His hands are on her waist, thumbs brushing the curve of her ribcage just below her breasts, and she shivers in response.  A responding wave of pheromones is carried on the tiny air current her action produces and they hit him like a slap in the face.  
  
The sensory data that his horns send straight to his hindbrain is rich with the elements that make Jade who she is: the smells of sweat and soap and bright red blood just below the surface of her thin, thin skin, the conjectures of what, if he put his tongue to use as she had just done, she would taste like, and finally, _finally_ , the hormones that course through her veins with every pulse of her heart.  
  
They’re different on many levels, of course, but there are some basic elements that, at the core, are the same.  There’s enough of that similarity there to tell him that, while her adrenaline is running high right about now, she’s not scared.  No, she’s curious and exhilarated, and beneath that – no, that can’t be right.  He shakes his head minutely, doing his best to rid himself of his traitorous thoughts.  Even if he _isn’t_ mistaken, which he probably is, there’s no way she’s actually interested in him.  
  
The way she’s looking at him, though, is enough to test his convictions.  Her eyes are hellfire green, the color of leaves and stars and nightmares, and they’re full of promise of things yet to come.  It’s a surprise when her arms snake their way around his neck, but when he suddenly finds her several inches closer than she just had been he can’t bring himself to be displeased.  There’s mischief glittering in her bright-dark eyes and the realization hits him: this is stage two of their game.  
  
He can handle that.  
  
In a single smooth motion, he picks her up so she can put her feet onto the top bar of the fence; she immediately understands his intentions and maneuvers herself over so she can sit.  She’s looking down at him now, but he has her exactly where he wants her.  He steps in and tilts his head up, blows a breath out against her throat.  When her fingers tangle in his hair, tugging but not quite pulling, he knows it’s safe to keep going.  
  
Eridan takes the first turn.  
  
He licks a thin trail up the side of her throat, ending over the point where he can feel her pulse beat hardest.  She tastes like salt and sweet and sparks and frost, a combination that has him purring low in the back of his throat.  In response, she tilts his face up and to the side and runs the very tips of her fingers over one of his ear-fins.  Jolts of sensation run down his spine as she catches the top membrane between forefinger and thumb and slides them against each other, grinning devilishly as she does so.  Her face is very close to his own and he takes the opportunity to lunge forward and leave a bite on the edge of her jaw.  It doesn’t quite spill blood, but she fights back when she grabs his horns by the bases and pulls him up to kiss her properly.


	9. Chapter 9

Suddenly, Jade is glad for the relative lightness of her clothing.  The sensation of tongue and teeth and finally, _finally_ , Eridan’s lips against her own sends a wave of heat rolling through her, fiery and deep.  She shifts closer in response, not yet letting go of his horns; the leverage they afford her is too much of an advantage to give up so easily!  
  
His hands are noticeably cool even through the fabric of her shirt; it must be an effect of the color of his blood, she hypothesizes.  They shift, and suddenly she has much better things to think about than dry scientific theory.  He’s tugging at the bottom of her shirt, just enough to let her know that he’s there but not actually _doing_ anything.  She sees his intent and raises him a long, slow pass over his horn with one of her hands, grinning into the kiss when he shudders and presses against her with renewed force.  
  
Her actions evidently provoked him into making good on his earlier teasing, as he’s now pulling her shirt upward in earnest.  Reluctantly, she pulls back just as much as she needs to in order to be able to get it over her head.  She grins with satisfaction when she sees the look on his face; it’s shock and awe and, judging from the brand-new wideness of his pupils, a fair bit of arousal as well.  
  
“I guess you’ve never seen a shirtless girl before,” she teases, and his eyes narrow.  
  
“Oh please,” he sneers, a smirk curling its way into his smile.  “You got no idea a’ what I’ve done, Harley.”  He forms his w’s and v’s in a very interesting fashion, she notes, almost trilling them in a way that she finds very attractive.  
  
“What I do know,” she begins, “is that you have excellent aim.”  Her words are intentionally loaded, and he rises to the occasion magnificently.  His hands, rough and calloused with years of hard work, drift up her sides to land on the back of his ribcage where it meets her spine.  The care and time he takes makes her realize that he is studying her biology just as surely as she is studying his, and the very thought that she is sitting on a fence, barely clothed and face-to-face with a real genuine alien, and all they’re doing is playing “how does it work” with each others’ bodies makes her burst out laughing.  
  
He pulls back, clearly offended, but she puts an immediate stop to that when she leans forward and wraps her arms around his neck and tugs him closer again.  “Don’t you think we have better things to be doing right now than scientific studies?”  His only response is a crooked grin and another kiss.  
  
She almost wants to say making out with him is like a fight, but it’s not harsh enough for that.  She’s heard him when he wants to be biting and antagonistic, and that doesn’t feel like this.  It’s still competitive without a doubt, but neither of them is really out to best the other.  He’s being gentle and slow for her benefit, that she knows, and she takes the time to fully appreciate it.  The slide of his lips over hers is soft, almost tender, but there’s just enough of an edge in the way he catches her lip between his teeth to give her a hint that their little contest is hardly over yet.  
  
Eridan’s hands move from the middle of her back to come to rest just under her arms, his wrists angled just enough that they don’t come into contact with anything other than air.  She hisses in frustration and bites his lip in retaliation, relishing the soft purr he releases in response.  
  
“Wait a minute,” she says, pulling back and arching an eyebrow at him.  “Here I am, less than a yard of fabric away from complete nudity,” (he blushes at this, turning a faint violet color that she can’t help but notice is _exceptionally_ becoming on him) “and yet you’ve somehow retained all your clothing!”  
  
“So what?” he responds, one ear fin fluttering in what must be his version of an eyebrow waggle.  
  
She grins triumphantly and his expression becomes wary almost in tandem, worried and yet anticipatory of what’s coming next.  
  
“So, strip!”


	10. Chapter 10

For a moment, he’s absolutely blindsided by her triumphant order. He had expected something in this vein, but maybe not quite so forthright; yet here he is, hands already on the top button of his jacket. It’s not like he’s going to let this go uncontested, though, and he lazily smirks up at her as the first fastening comes free.

“As I recall, it was me instigatin’ a lot a’ that on your part. The least a lady like yourself could do in this situation is return the favor.” There’s just enough of a teasing lilt to his words to make it obvious that they’re meant in jest, but yet again she takes him by surprise when she jumps down from the fence and slips her hands under his own to undo the next button.

He’s hardly going to turn down a golden opportunity to push the tide of events back into his favor, and so he slides his hands down her arms, flicks the claws of his thumbs over the paper-thin skin of her arm joints, watches her shiver and a little bit more black swell into the green of her eyes. They narrow and before he can register movement she’s pushed his lapels to the sides and darted in.

He braces himself for a repeat of the gill incident but instead she presses the side of her head to the flat of his chest like she’s searching for something. She pauses when she hits upon the region from which the stuttery beat of his bloodpusher emanates, just stops and listens. His hands are still on her arms and now that she’s gone still and quiet and there’s no more fighting he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Then she looks up at him like she wants to take him apart, slow and burning, and suddenly he has a brain full of too many ideas. She must know, somehow, because her arms tense and she shoves him, hooks her ankle behind his and forces him to land with his back flat against the ground.

He’s not going to go down without a fight, though, and when she tries to pin his shoulders down he twists away, scales slipping under her fingers like so much water. She hisses in frustration as he grabs her around the hips, claws ripping into the cheap fabric and scratching the skin underneath. A push to the side later and she’s sprawled on the ground, making noises he’d previously thought only trolls were capable of producing. The threat that her low growl poses causes his claws to instinctively dig in further, scratching red across the lines of her hips.

She yelps, then quick as a flash lifts her hands to the delicate skin behind his ear-fins and tears. For a moment, he’s too shocked to move. The cool trickle of blood on his neck snaps him out of his reverie, but not before she’s thrown him off balance again. Suddenly, Jade is on top of him, the solid weight of her hips on his own doing nothing to alleviate the building ache of his bulge.

The look on her face has changed, he notes; now it’s something decidedly less black and a little more red. She traces the welts she left with a delicate brush of her fingertips and the look on her face when he shudders into her touch is nothing short of reverent.  
She leans down and kisses him again, and this time it’s different; not a fight, not a proclamation, not territorial or possessive or demanding. It just is, and the lack of a detectable ulterior motive shakes him more than anything she’s done thus far. He relaxes his grip and retracts his claws, strokes up her sides and opens his mouth into the fluttery breath she takes in response. Everything is heavy and warm and as far as he’s concerned he could stay right where he is forever and never think of anything but kissing Jade.

She’s not done with him though, far from it, and she shifts down lower to press a kiss against his neck, right in the middle where his pulse beats strong on both sides. Moments later, a shock of primal fear runs through him when her head turns and rests on his neck; he waits for the sharp rip of horns and the cool spill of blood and why by the old gods did he ever make himself so vulnerable-

but none of that comes. She just rests there, listening to the flow of air and blood in his neck, stretches out her legs and drapes herself over him like she’s a spoiled cat and he’s her favorite armrest. Slowly, cautiously, he slides his hands up and over her sides in a loose embrace, humming low in his thorax when she shifts so they end up on her hips, one forearm crossed over the other. It’s surprisingly nice, just laying there with no threats to fend off, no weak points to defend.

It’s a little bit like everything he never dared to hope for.


End file.
